Category: Collection

In Nato Thompson’s essay, Participation and Spectacle: Where are We Now in Living as Form, he discussions Ranciére’s essay, “The Uses of Democracy” from 1992. He explains that “Ranciére notes that participation in what we normally refer to as democratic regimes is usually reduced to a question of filling up the spaces left empty by power.”

While Thompson further summarizes Ranciére, “Genuine participation […] is somthing different: the invention of an ‘unpredicatble subject’ who momentarily occupies the street, the factory, or the museum — rather than a fixed space of allocated participation whose count-power is dependent on the dominant order.”

The term artist is an antiquated idea in trying to come to terms with this reality. It can be a useful category because the skillsets of artists are being deployed by power in various forms. But the manipulation of cultural symbols is nowhere remotely the sole purview of artists.

– MITx will offer a portfolio of MIT courses for free to a virtual community of learners around the world. It will also enhance the educational experience of its on-campus students, offering them online tools that supplement and enrich their classroom and laboratory experiences.

The first MITx course, 6.002x (Circuits and Electronics), will be launched in an experimental prototype form. Watch this space for further upcoming courses, which will become available in Fall 2012.

Joanna Choukeir – Interesting example of PhD research process and documentation. She says, "I view informed and intelligent design as having a powerful role in affecting positive social change beyond the market-driven aesthetics that it is most popularly associated with."